Page 40 - SHARP November 2021

MAN WORTH LISTENING TO
Peter Mansbridge on a Life in News
With his new autobiography, Off the Record, Mansbridge chronicles his career as the face of Canadian broadcasting
BY DAVID ELIAS
FOR LEGIONS OF CANADIAN TELEVISION VIEWERS, PETER MANSBRIDGE WAS
the voice and the face of broadcast news in Canada for more than 50 years. Throughout his tenure as anchor of CBC News’s flagship nightly newscast, The National, from 1988 to 2017, Mansbridge’s famous baritone was a voice of clarity, trust, and authority to his viewers during some bewildering events. He reported on the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the terrorist attacks of 9/11, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that followed. He has covered papal and royal visits (royal funerals and marriages too) and 13 Olympic Games.
During his career, Mansbridge conducted 15,000 interviews — among them, U.S. President Barack Obama, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and every Canadian prime minister since Pierre Elliott Trudeau. He was awarded the Order of Canada in 2008, and in 2017, he signed-off from CBC News for the final time, concluding a career that had made him, in the eyes of many of his viewers, a national treasure.
Here, he discusses whether there’s catharsis in writing a memoir, the future of news, and how he once, briefly, left Stephen Harper at a loss for words.
How did it feel to retrace the steps of your long career for Off The Record?
I had resisted it. I didn’t want to do a kind of conven- tional memoir. I [wanted to] do a sort of a collection of anecdotes. And [my publisher] ended up saying yes, as long as I would do a little bit of the conven- tional memoir stuff — tell people a little bit about my upbringing, and something more substantive about journalism, and about the country as I’ve been lucky enough to witness it on so many levels over my career.
You were born in the U.K., and you arrived in Can- ada from Malaysia in 1956. And your education in Canadian politics began, in a fairly surprising way, shortly afterwards?
The National Film Board wanted to use my sister in a film on the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa. And I was much younger, about 10 years old. And I walked home at lunchtime, and there were these guys in the house and they wanted to cast a boy in the film, too. And I said, “Well, hey, I could play the boy.” I don’t know where that came from — I wasn’t that kind of outgoing kid. But that’s the way it turned out. It was a one-off thing and it was great to tour the Parliament Buildings. It’s an incredible structure and very dominant on the Ottawa skyline. I got to meet the prime minister of the day, John Diefenbaker. And I never thought of it then, but it’s funny when I look back because he was the first prime minister that I met face-to-face and from then on, I’ve met them all.
Is there a story that you covered early in your career that had a lasting impact on you?
In my early days in Churchill, Manitoba, in the late 1960s, I’d started this news operation on my own. I was kind of a one-man-band little radio station there. Part of my daily routine was talking to the local RCMP to find out what was happening. A fire had happened in one of the Indigenous communities near the village, in a Chippewa community. A number of people had died. I’d seen it — the fire — and the attempts to save people. And I saw them bring out an infant who had died of smoke inhalation. We all, in this business, see awful things that you can’t unsee, and you certainly can’t unsee your first situation like that. I’ve never forgotten that moment. Because that kid’s oppor- tunity in life was not great to begin with, before that fire started. And sadly, here we are, 50 or 60 years later, and it’s still an issue. It’s unforgivable. We all have to accept some part of that blame.
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